The Crisis in Creativity Research Stems From Too Little Fragmentation, Not Too Much

A B S T R A C T Glaveanu is right that there is a crisis in creativity research, but his prescription would make things worse, not better. It is the attempt to build grand, domain-transcending, all- encompassing theories that has crippled creativity research and led to a field in which it is the norm for research results to contradict each other. Creativity is more like expertise (where every domain has its own definition and understand- ing of what constitutes expertise) than intelligence (where g reigns, albeit not without critics). The skills, traits, and moti- vations that lead to creative performance in physics, poetry, and painting are not fungible: one's intrinsic motivation to write poetry cannot be transmuted into a love of painting, one's openness to experience in art does not make one more open to new ideas in physics, and one's physics- related divergent-thinking skill will not lead to more creative poems. Intrinsic motivation, openness to experience, and divergent thinking may promote creativity in many (but prob- ably not all) domains, but they are different in each domain, as will be their effects. Treating them as domain-general skills or attributes invites confusion. We need more fragmen- tation, in the sense of more domain-specific theories, if we want to make progress in understanding creativity.